It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Sir Edward. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden on promoting the Bill and on the thought he put into focusing on improving the functionality and transparency of the ombudsman and the ombudsman  process. As he rightly said, there will always be lessons to be learnt in all aspects of our NHS. We can improve care by learning from things that have gone wrong.

The Bill is informed by the terrible events that surrounded the Sam Morrish case and looks to address the lack of timeliness from the ombudsman in looking into the family’s concerns. It is right that my right hon. Friend has promoted the Bill and I am pleased to hear that it has support on both sides of the Committee. I am sure that all Members will be able to support it.

I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex, who has taken a keen interest—understandably so, given his position as Chair of the Public Administration Committee—not only in how the ombudsman works and, more broadly, the working of the ombudsman and how the ombudsman can be better held to account by his Committee and Parliament, but in how the ombudsman’s reports and actions can be better implemented by the NHS as a whole. His Committee has done some welcome work on that throughout this Parliament. I thank him for the scrutiny that he brings to bear on such issues.

Undoubtedly, the tragic events surrounding the Sam Morrish case have been the main driving force behind this welcome Bill. When things do go wrong in the health service, be they in a clinical setting or in the handling of complaints, it is important that lessons are learnt. It is about ensuring that things can be put right to improve patient care and that the families and others who are still going through difficult times in trying to come to terms with a terrible event that has affected their lives and the lives of people they care about can, in some way, shape or form, be better understood, if not ever fully reconciled. Nobody can take away the pain of loss from a death or a tragic event, but it is the duty of our health service and of the ombudsman, as an independent part of that public service, to be mindful that there is a public service duty, and that public service is about doing the very best for the people we are trying to look after. That goes to the heart of what my right hon. Friend is trying to achieve in promoting the Bill.

I will try briefly to address some of the points raised by the shadow Minister. As my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex outlined, following on from the thoughtful and well-received report by the Public Administration Committee, Robert Gordon has undertaken a review of the ombudsman landscape more generally. The Government are considering that report and will publish their response in the near future. I hope that the Minister present at the next stage of the Bill’s consideration will be able to update the House on a better time line if the response has not been published then.

The shadow Minister also raised the 12-month time line in the Bill. As we have discussed today, timeliness is important throughout the regulatory and complaints framework of the health service. In holding the professional regulators to account, the PSA is especially focused on regulators ensuring that they can deal with complaints about a practitioner’s fitness to practice in a timely manner, for reasons of safety and of ethics. The importance of timeliness and the consideration that one year is a reasonable time for the ombudsman to conclude investigations lie behind the Bill, and that is consistent with the broader approach in this area. We wanted a  time frame for the handling of complaints not just for the sake of transparency and openness, and our understanding of how we can put things right, but so as to be mindful of the experiences of families at a difficult time and of how they can be helped to come to terms with what has happened, as far as is possible—or, if that is not possible, at least to understand it better.

I do not intend to detain the Committee much longer. The Government fully support the Bill, which has welcome and widespread support on both sides of the House. Clause 1 is fairly self-explanatory. I would like to pay a brief tribute to the ombudsman, who has worked well to make the office more transparent and accountable, as my right hon. Friend explained. She has greatly increased the number of complaints investigated, and those complaints are generally reviewed and assessed in a timely fashion. There are, however, times when that does not happen, so it is important to ensure that we tackle that issue so that that is not the case in the future, which is precisely the reason for the Bill.

The clause will rightly ensure that complainants are given the reason for delay in any case in which the investigation has not been completed. I remind hon. Members that the health service ombudsman is independent of the Government and is directly accountable to Parliament through the Public Administration Committee, which is chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex. I am sure that we are all very grateful for the work that he has been doing in that Committee further to investigate the role of the health service ombudsman.

The Bill will strengthen those arrangements by placing a duty on the ombudsman to inform Parliament annually of how long it has taken to investigate cases, how many investigations have taken more than 12 months and of action being taken to conclude all cases within 12 months. I understand that, during this Parliament, the Health Committee has regularly called in a number of the professional regulatory bodies—on an annual basis, I believe—to report on their performance. That might be something that my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex wishes to look at in the Public Administration Committee—an annual review of the ombudsman and, specifically, some issues with performance and dealing with complaints.